In our company, most of the technical team is in India. Our clients are primarily in New York and New Jersey, with some in Boston and Virginia as well. We work with our partners in Europe whose products we market, sell and maintain in South Asia and South-East Asia.

With such a scattered nature of our operations, we needed an online project management tool to support the global nature of our company and clientele and the resulting time zone gaps.

We tried
Basecamp

, but it’s not quite mature enough. We also tried using our clients’ project management tools. Some clients use
JIRA

, for instance, which does a great job of tracking requests and bugs but not powerful enough to cover the whole gamut of project management. And any tool that relies on email to coordinate requests is just hard to manage. Emails get lost. People don’t know how to keep track of them. We’ve also tried using
Microsoft OneNote

and
Excel

to keep track of the work, but it’s not the most efficient way.

And we used
Microsoft Project

, but it fell short for us. One, other people are not aware of the project progress unless you publish it online. We don’t have the means to do that. So I’d send copies, PDF versions to people through email. If I made a small change, I had to email an updated PDF. In a distributed environment like we have – a dozen people in the U.S., a dozen people in India, five or six people in Europe, and me traveling – Microsoft Project is not a good tool.

Zoho Solution

Today, we use
Zoho Projects extensively, almost as much as we use email. We track a dozen client projects in addition to departmental activity outside of our development team.
We not only use Zoho Projects for our income generating projects with our clients but also to run our company.

We created projects for our company administration, finance, marketing, HR, etc. This way we are able to create milestones (long term goals) and tasks and assign them to appropriate individuals and track their progress.

Zoho Projects + Google Apps Advantage

Zoho Projects is tightly coupled with Google Apps, and that helps us a lot. It means, we don’t have to maintain documents in both locations. And the moment we define the dates for a task, it shows up in Google calendars of the people assigned to the task.

Susan 6 years ago

sam 6 years ago

Zoho Project is good.. But what will be best is to have complete integration of Zoho Projects with Zoho HR and with Zoho CRM..Once, a lead is closed in Zoho CRM one can start off a project in Zoho Projects and assign resources using Zoho HR..Wishful thinking, but can become a reality!Way to go Zoho!